Seek,
Yes, we were the original owners - the vehicle was picked up with somewhere around 500 to 700 miles on it, IIRC. We bought it from a dealer who had picked it up from another dealer several states away for a customer and had driven it back. The customer ended up not taking the vehicle.
My not changing the air filter was not unknowing - IOW,
I intentionally did not change it - and was relying on the restriction gauge. The reasons I decided to change it was several-fold: 1. I already had the filter and actually had it for almost a year and had been carting it around under my sleeper bunk in the van (being in the air filter housing was probably a safer place for it than under my bunk with all the other junk
), 2. from what I know and have read, air filters will often go from an acceptable level of restriction to an unacceptable one fairly rapidly - I was doing a major maintenance on the vehicle and just incorporated changing the filter into what I was doing, so that I wouldn't have to deal with it while running a load (which are often tight, time-wise), 3. the mfg's replacement recommendation is: A. if the filter shows restricted, or B.
every three years ....
I quite possibly could have gotten another 25K or 50K miles out of it.
........ next time mebbe .....
:
The gauge does work on my vehicle - I checked it by applying a vacuum directly to the gauge itself, using a vacuum cleaner and rag to form a seal (which is slightly different than applying a vacuum to the air filter housing) As I recall, I was able to get the gauge to advance the restriction indicator (so that red on the dial showed) without even creating that tight of seal with the rag. Would have been better (or a little more scientific) if I had actually used a vacuum pump with a gauge ......
I've read some posts (mostly on the Yahoo Sprinter Group) of
opinions that the gauge does not work. Many of these opinions seemed to based on the fact that the gauge never showed any restriction (well duh ....... if the filter ain't restricted it ain't gonna .....
) and as I recall none of them were based on actually testing the mechanism itself.
...... kudos to Sven for actually testing it ...... but since I wasn't there
and didn't actually observe exactly what he did ..... I'm reluctant to trust his report ..... might be true ..... and it might be his procedure for testing it was flawed ..... dunno .... at any rate I was there when I tested mine ...... and I
know what the results of that were. My gauge works as advertised.
In my opinion, one probably runs more of a risk of letting dirt get by the filter by changing the filter every 10K miles - than by letting it go for 50K miles (arbitrary numbers, just pulled out of the air .... or some darker place
) - simply because you run the risk of not getting the filter properly seated in the housing and allowing dirty air to get thru ....... that's just an opinion though .....
If you want to get some additional data on air filtration, the life of air filters, the need to change them, and how these type of restriction gauges work, then go here:
http://www.filterminder.com/
.... and read the pages linked on the sidebar of the page. While this company doesn't make the restriction gauge that comes on the Sprinter, they do make the ones that Dodge offers on RAM's with the Cummins Turbo Diesel (I have one on my '05 RAM 3500 CTD
)